It's really amusing how bad Amazon is at writing and designing UI. For a company of their size and scope it's practically unforgivable. But they always get away with it.
At best, you can conclude that outdated product design doesn't always ruin a business (clearly). But you can't conclude the inverse (that investing in modern product design doesn't ever help a business).
That's a great point. Further, there are many sizeable businesses built on top of AWS where they deliver the abstractions with compression that earns them their margin.
Case in point: tell me, from the point of view of the user, how many steps it takes to deploy a NextJS/React ecosystem website with Vercel and with AWS, start to finish.
I think they have plenty of competition in the cloud computing space. It seems fair to say that their strategy of de-prioritizing UI/UX in favor of getting features out the door more quickly and cheaply has benefitted them.
However, I don't think it's fair to say that this trade-off always wins out. Rather, they've carved out their own ecological niche and, for now, they're exploiting it well.
Oh I'm sure, the ACM UI was impossible to use for years to find certificates, they improved it, but, it will never have the same level of functionality that the API gives you and that's the bread and butter.
Imagine a native desktop app that let you build a UI with very basic elements, à la Visual Basic, and behind each of those elements is an associated AWS CLI command. Such that "aws s3 ls" attached to a list element would render an account's buckets.
The AWS APIs are so expansive, a product like this could offer a complete replacement for the default web console and maybe even charge for it. Does anyone know if such a solution exists? Perhaps some more generic "shell-to-ui" application? If not, I'm interested in building one if anybody would like to contribute.
It makes more sense to conclude that if you have market dominance, you can get away with a lot, especially since we see this time and again in other matters, not just UI.
That happens when you ask SWE to design.
To fix this, Amazon will need to do extensive UX research and incrementally make changes until the UI doesn't look the same and is more usable. Because users hate sudden change.
What do you think is comparable but better? I think you’re really seeing that they have a large organization with a lot of people working on different complex products, which makes major changes much harder to coordinate, and their market skews technical and prioritizes functionality higher than design so there isn’t a huge amount of pressure.
"Jeff Bezos is an infamous micro-manager. He micro-manages every single pixel of Amazon's retail site. He hired Larry Tesler, Apple's Chief Scientist and probably the very most famous and respected human-computer interaction expert in the entire world, and then ignored every goddamn thing Larry said for three years until Larry finally -- wisely -- left the company."
Why was this being downvoted? It’s first-party evidence that substantiates the claims of the parent comment, and adds interesting historical context from major industry players